A very common coding technique SAS programmers use is identifying the largest value for a given column using DATA Step BY statement with the DESCENDING option. In this example I wanted to find the largest value of the number of runs (nRuns) by each team in the SASHELP.BASEBALL dataset. Using a SAS workspace server, one would write:

Figure 1. Single Threaded DATA Step in SAS Workspace Server

Figure 2 shows the results of the code we ran in Figure 1:

Figure 2. Result from SAS Code Displayed in Figure 1

To run this DATA Step distributed we will leveraging the SAS® Cloud Analytic Services in SAS® Viya. Notice in Figure 3, there is no need for the PROC SORT step which is required when running DATA Step single threaded in a SAS workspace server. This is because SAS® Cloud Analytic Services in SAS® Viya. Instead we will use